Air Force Brat by Susan Kiernan-Lewis

Introduction
    I was not ten years old when my older
brother first placed a live bomb in my hands.
    It was the early sixties and he would offer
up many more unexploded WW II explosives unearthed from the
countryside of France before he finally got too old and jaded to
care about finding them. By then we’d both moved on to other
things, having miraculously survived our childhood as well as our
curiosity about “living history.”
    This particular bomb was about twenty
inches, oblong and metallic gray. It had little fins at the end to
help it fly and weighed about fifteen pounds. When my brother first
handed it to me—an extraordinary feat in itself considering how
unpleasant his typical behavior was toward me and our two younger
brothers—I instantly hefted it over my head and threw it.
    My brother made whistling noises to simulate
the bomb’s descent. It landed with a thud at the base of an ancient
Mirabelle bush.
    “ Where did you find it?” I
asked.
    He gave me a disdainful look. It was
possible that conversation wasn’t a part of the
so-far-not-unfriendly sibling exchange. Finally, he squinted and
nodded toward a distant knoll.
    “ There’s more, too,” he
said.
    There would have to be if he was allowing me
to put my hands all over this one.
    “ You want it?” he
asked.
    My younger brothers, Terry and Kevin, aged
seven and eight, suddenly emerged from a long, winding path that
led up from the village on a steep, staircased hill of several
poorly tended rows of grapes.
    “ Want what?” one of them
asked. The idea that Tommy—Tommy the Wicked, Tommy the
Tormentor—might be actually giving something away wasn’t instantly
believable to any of us.
    “ The bomb?” I asked,
dumbfounded.
    “ You found a bomb?” Kevin,
the older of the two little boys, stepped up to the bomb. He nudged
it with his foot. “What kind is it?”
    Tommy shrugged. “German, it looks like,” he
said.
    We never doubted Tommy’s knowledge when it
came to bombs or guns or airplanes. If he said it was German, it
was German.
    I picked up the bomb and handed it to Kevin.
“It’s ours now,” I said.
    Instantly, he ran with the bomb, holding it
chest high and making the appropriate airplane noises. Our youngest
brother, Terry, ran after him. I watched Kevin heave the bomb onto
some bushes. The branches splayed apart awkwardly.
    “ My turn! My turn!” Terry
called, grabbing for the bomb.
    I looked at Tommy.
    “ Thanks a lot,” I
said.
    He made a face as if the effort of
generosity was physically painful.
    “ If you come near my
mort,” he said grimly, “you’ll be sorry.”
    I looked in the direction of the knoll.
    “ Maybe you should tell me
where it is,” I said. “So I don’t accidentally stumble onto
it.”
    He gave an ugly laugh.
    “ Like that would happen,”
he said, and turned and left.
    There were four of us children living abroad
in rural France in 1962. At twelve, Tommy was the oldest. I was
next, the only girl, then Kevin, and Terry was the youngest at only
eight. Living overseas, away from our usual support systems, our
typical American schedules and conveniences and television shows,
had been as easy adaptation for us kids. As dependents in a
military family, we knew intrinsically the feeling of belonging,
first to a close-knit nuclear family, and secondly to the United
States Air Force.
    As for many dependents, the memory of
belonging, which is so prevalent in the military, is a warm and
restorative one. You always had the feeling that you mattered, that
there was a spot for you. As a result, you could take on new
challenges, new billets in strange new countries, leave your best
friend behind, over and over again, be the new kid in school, two,
three times a year, because you belonged to the coolest, biggest
club of all.
    Being a military brat was like having a
life-membership to a club, but unlike the cozy membership of being
a Baptist or a Catholic or a Dodgers fan, this club had special
schools just for